Northern lights

The Edinburgh Festival started in 1947 as essentially a music festival, the brainchild of Glyndebourne’s John Christie. The capital was soon turned into a magnet for fringe theatre and other events. It is said that dour natives fearing success left town in a hurry in order to escape the culture-tourist influx. Meanwhile public and private galleries rose to the occasion with special exhibitions, despite the fact that the visual arts have never been part of the official International Festival. Douglas Cooper’s threat to resign his curatorship of a major 1960s Arts Council Delacroix show because some loans had been refused was a sign, among other things, that standards were of the highest. This year the National Galleries of Scotland offer no fewer than three superb exhibitions. They are Gauguin’s Vision; Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Gauguin did not think, with Walter Pater, that all art aspires to the condition of music. He simply thought that painting was superior to all other arts. At the same time, in contrast with Kenneth Clark, whose visual arts television series was actually called Civilisation, Gauguin thought of civilisation as a sort of disease — hence his passion for primitive Brittany and then Tahiti. It seems that the simple piety of Breton peasant women was so great that after a sermon they actually visualised Jacob wrestling with an angel. In this highly focused show at the Royal Scottish Academy (until 2 October), the National Gallery of Scotland’s own crucial Brittany masterpiece by Paul Gauguin, ‘Vision of the Sermon’, 1888, is explored in unprecedented depth and width by the art historian and curator Belinda Thomson.

Whereas Delacroix’s rendering of the subject had been about the wrestling match itself, Gauguin’s was about the amazingly dressed Breton women’s visionary experience of it. The painting marks a key point in Gauguin’s move away from naturalism and typically Impressionist subjects to more imaginative content and a more subjective style.